Can digital data be stored on vinyl?

Store it on stainless steel ribbon like a flight data recorder. Capable of surviving high velocity impacts with the ground and temperatures up to 1400 C.

 

Yeah, but the bitrate on those things is abysmal.

How long will a flash drive last, just sitting there unused? With no moving parts and completely sealed from the elements, I've gotta think they'd last indefinitely, but don't know if anyone has tested them as archival storage.

 

Unknown.
However, current flash memory technology wears out with use.
http://news.discovery.com/space/mars-rover-opportunity-suffers-worrying-bouts-of-amnesia-141229.htm
Then there are cosmic rays to be worried about so bury that archival flash card deep.
http://www.cnet.com/news/slow-but-rugged-curiositys-computer-was-built-for-mars/

 

The floppy ROM:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/the-floppy-rom-software-distributed-on-records/

http://www.kempa.com/vinyl-data/

 

Right, but not just sitting there, AFAIK (although radiation - especially cosmic rays - could become an issue over time...).

Interesting! That article mentions the Tarbell interface, which Tomita also used on his album The Bermuda Triangle to encode brief snippets of text - it sounded pretty much just like the squeal a modem made on a phone line. Looks like traditional vinyl encoded that way could handle 1200 baud, but not always reliably. That's actually really crummy, but not surprising since cassette tape was always limited to about 1200 baud as well IIRC.

I'm sure we could do better today with more advanced encoding schemes, ultrasonic-capable needles and such, but I'm not clear on where the upper limit would be. Bonding modems - where you'd have two separate phone lines - could reach over 120kbps, or 100 times faster than 1200 baud. Since stereo vinyl has two channels maybe you could encode a similar signal there. And vinyl has more bandwidth to begin with, but my guess is most of that would be consumed with error correction.

Yesterday I was thinking you could cram about as much digital content onto a vinyl record as you could onto a CD, but now I'm thinking that's highly unlikely. You'd need a tenfold increase in bandwidth over a bonding modem to have the same information density of a CD (around a megabit per second). That would be a stretch I'd imagine.

 

From what I understand, the original method for storing digital data for compact disc involved converting the digital information into a video signal and storing that signal on video tape. That's the reason for the 44.1khz sampling rate (which works out evenly mathematically when storing as the signal as NTSC or as PAL). This method was used because the cost of digital recorders was expensive at the time compact disc format was established.

Returning to the original question, I think it is possible to store digital data on vinyl but an issue would be how much data can be stored on side of a record (enough for a song? an album?). Another issue would be how to store the disc and how durable it would be.

A related video format was CED (a video format that was a competitor for laserdisc for a time) which used a stylus/groove method for playback like with vinyl. However, unlike vinyl you never touched the CED disc directly, instead you put the entire case into the player and then pulled it out while the disc remained in the player.

 

Right, and videotape has scads more bandwidth than vinyl. It's not even close.

Yup. Less bandwidth than videotape though, but much, much more than a traditional vinyl record. I'm thinking the upper limit for traditional vinyl would be considerably less than what CED was capable of, which means you'd be lucky to get 100MB per side.

 

Here is a waveform from a cassette with a ZX81 program on it:

Zeroes are represented by 4 pulses, ones are 9 pulses. The timing works out to about 250 to 400 bits per second, depending on how many zeroes and ones.

So to store the equivalent of one 50GB blu ray disc, we would need a tape to run somewhere between 32 and 50 YEARS. Those tape loads could be very finicky, so hopefully you wouldn't get a glitch around year 30 which aborted the load, because you would have to start over.

 

Thanks for the lesson. The point is regardless of the storage device or format, the signal needs to be manipulated so we can hear it. Conversion to a digital signal will result is far less degradation of the original source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_electronics

 

I might add that any recorded signal, analog or digital, must be manipulated so it can be heard, seen, or...

 

Not to be picky, but that is definitely not true. A square wave is a particularly difficult waveform to deal with because a perfect square wave requires theoretically infinite frequency response. A square wave is not realizable in the real world. A pure sine wave is much much easier to record and transmit.

 

Look at the scratches on that thing! Some alien is gonna be pissed when they play it and it skips! Darn Earthlings!